The Internet, because of its relative interactivity with a user, provides rich and plentiful advertising opportunities. The Internet model provides for advertisements that are accountable and provide for direct response and interactivity. When a user accesses a commercial Web site, the user may be greeted with a popup advertisement, portions of the viewing screen being occupied by fixed or animated advertisements, scrolling banners, or fixed or moving advertisements that appear when the user clicks on links or performs steps in a purchase. Internet advertisement opportunities appear based on space, time, content, and user context and may be highly non-linear (i.e., the user chooses to initiate the playing of content and in response, the content starts).
In contrast, traditional advertising for broadcast and cable television and on radio has followed a linear model. Programming may be linear in the sense that a program begins and is streamed and in progress when a user chooses to view entertainment content. FIG. 1 illustrates the differences and similarities between a linear and nonlinear model. Entertainment content 2, when processed as a digital data stream over cable networks, may be divided into a number of time intervals. The time intervals 4 comprise the time reserved for the viewed program (content), such as “Golden Girls.” The intervals 6, 8, 10, represent sections of time reserved for advertisements or “avails.” These “avails” may be viewed advertisement placement opportunities. A placement opportunity is a construct that represents an opportunity to insert an advertisement or entertainment content, and defines the rules for that opportunity, such as its duration, interactivity, ownership, and technical constraints.
In linear over-the-air or traditional cable TV broadcasting, each of the intervals 6, 8, 10 are known as breaks with no distinction of ordering. Advertisement time may occur before, during, or after the intervals 4 in the breaks, each break comprising a “pod,” each “pod” containing one or more “avails.” The list of programs and breaks comes to a service provider in a schedule, and may provide additional information as to which entity, e.g., a network, an operator, or other entity, owns each of the avails. A traffic and billing system then reads the schedule and identifies which network, operator, or other entity has the right to place an advertisement during a particular avail of a given pod during a given break. Existing cable systems provide static sales—e.g., a 30 second spot in a particular geographic market which is inserted into one or more of the breaks 6, 8, 10.
In non-linear systems, such as Video-on-Demand, the intervals 6, 8, 10 take on new meaning. The interval 6 is called a pre-roll, i.e., the space in a video that occurs immediately after a user clicks to start a VOD video. The interval 10 is known as a post-roll, i.e., the space after all of the VOD video segments have finished playing. The intervals 8 may be mid-rolls, i.e., mini-breaks in the middle of a VOD video, or may be interstitials, i.e., pod-like locations between consecutive VOD video segments. All of the intervals 6, 8, 10 in such playlists are ripe for the insertion of advertisements, i.e., advertisement placement opportunities.
In the traditional model for the placement of ads in television programming, avails are specified by a simple combination of channel and time and decided weeks ahead of broadcast. However, new cable content delivery systems allow for advertising spots of many different durations, allow for different levels of interactivity (e.g., polling or linking) through the use of buttons on a remote control, may be defined by geography, etc. In a world where TV viewing is becoming increasingly non-linear (e.g., video-on-demand (VOD), networked-based personal video recorders (PVR), interactive programs) a key goal of advertisement opportunity placement systems is to determine how to define placement opportunities that are non-deterministic and manifest dynamically Advanced advertising needs to accommodate advertisement placement opportunities that are invoked by user events, which may include anything from playback of a VOD title to pausing one's DVR. As the scope of potential placement opportunities expands accordingly, it becomes necessary to precisely define those placement opportunities with attributes representing relevant business rules. These may be used to specify such things as inventory splits, quantity, duration, and position of ad breaks (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll); placement of pause ads and overlays; and levels and types of interactivity.
On the Internet, the content publisher and the advertiser are often isolated from one another, with the advertising network acting as an intermediary. On TV, the advertising network was the national network, the cable network, or the cable operator, that had fixed avails. However, emerging advanced advertising standards for dynamic television provide an opportunity for content providers to derive value from the cable operators ad placement infrastructure by creating new and more flexible advertising inventory (i.e., Potential Viewership*Placement Opportunities=Advertising Inventory). This new business model imposes unique technical challenges: unlike the Internet, where browsers access/display content and then are separately “referred” to a shared ad network, the cable television infrastructure needs to select and assemble both the advertisement and the content together in the network and deliver the combined result to customers' set top boxes. For this to work, cable television advanced advertising networks must at least partially operate within the infrastructure of a Multiple System/Service Operator (MSO—a cable TV organization that owns more than one cable system and may prove broadband Internet service). To achieve optimal addressability and user experience and achieve bandwidth efficiencies, advertising service elements and digital delivery components need to be located close to the edge of the network, i.e., at or near set top boxes. Decisions need to be made based upon relevant context (infrastructure, platform, content, geography, demographics, etc), which are applicable to non advertisements as well (e.g., suggested content). By making placement decisions and insertions at the time of a user request—or even at the appropriate times during content playout—fully dynamic ad placement may be achieved.
Accordingly, what would be desirable, but has not yet been provided, is a method and system that enables a provider of content with the ability to dynamically identify and customize advertisement placement opportunities for dynamic decisions, and distribute advertisement placement opportunities according to market, technical, and customer needs.